With the public release of the NIDS dataset, almost every weather site on the Internet has capability of NEXRAD display. Unfortunately, these displays are final products for the user's interpretation with utility only in their web browser. These displays are mostly generated by meteorological programs that consider an image the final result of a data processing system.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) changes this paradigm by asserting that raster images are describable with meta data and can be further processed within GIS systems. The Iowa Environmental Mesonet (IEM) has been working on methods to provide NEXRAD imagery in GIS systems using Open Source Software (OSS) utilizing Open GIS Consortium (OGC) standards. For example, the IEM produces a nationwide composite of base reflectivity every five minutes in GIS raster format. This theme is dynamically served over the Internet as a Web Map Service (WMS) to OGC clients like ESRI's Arc Explorer 4.0.1.

The combination of NEXRAD information and GIS has opened the door to many new and exciting collaborations. Our progress thus far is presented with details about current operational use of our data serving system.